Rex and Jennifer Todd have returned to their roots, a down-home life on the farm.
He grew up on an acreage in rural Cushing, Iowa, with crops and a few cows just a mile down the road from where he lives with his wife now. Jennifer’s family lived on a farm roughly 30 miles north, outside of Marcus.
“We both grew up in the country so town living wasn’t exactly our style,” he said.
After six years in suburbia, the countryside was calling.
But the call came too soon. The couple put their house on the market and it sold before their new home was built. Rex and Jennifer, plus their 7-year-old daughter Maddison and puggle dog Dozer, moved in with his parents.
They had been living in Elk Point, S.D., which was closer to work but farther from family. Rex is a computer network analyst at the University of South Dakota, and Jennifer is a nurse at UnityPoint Clinic Family Medicine in Sergeant Bluff.
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The opportunity arose to live on a tree-lined property that was owned by Rex’s father, which presented a potential dwelling place where relatives would be their neighbors.
“Both of my grandparents live two miles of here either way,” he said. “We were back here all the time anyways.”
They had never built a house before. They focused on form, function and flow to find the right layout. They wanted a one-level floor plan that maximized the use of space and provided ample storage in what’s intended to be their forever home.
“We had a pretty good idea of what we like,” he said.
The only contested feature was the color of the front door. The couple couldn’t come to an agreement.
“I wanted red. She wanted white. You can see what color it is now,” he said, smiling.
It’s white.
“Red would have looked good,” she playfully prodded. “It would have popped.”
Their modern country-style home with a charming front porch and dormer windows replaced an old 1920s farmhouse that stood warped by the prairie winds, beyond a state of repair.
The new house was partially built off-site through Amwood Homes. L & L Home Builders, a family-owned business based in Marcus, is a representative of the Wisconsin company that specializes in panelized homebuilding.
The Todds decided to forgo conventional construction in an attempt to outwit Mother Nature and expedite the process as this past winter doled out record lows and turned much of the Midwest into a perpetual ice box.
Amwood pioneered standardized construction methods nearly four decades ago by assembling the floor deck system, wall panels and roof trusses in a manufacturing facility and, then, shipping them to the building site. The system allows for better cost control, consistent quality and cuts down on wasted materials, according to the company’s website.
The framework for the home arrived on three big trailers. By the third day, the rafters were up. The shortened timeline appealed to the family of three since they were living with Rex’s parents.
“They were nice enough to have us for seven months,” Jennifer said.
As their custom prefab home came together, Rex and Jennifer put their personal touch on different attributes of its interior. A floor-to-ceiling stone fireplace in the living room features a handcrafted mantel made by Rex and his dad in the woodshop.
They also enjoy the amenities of a second porch on the backside of the house, where she can catch the soothing afternoon sun from her chaise lounge and he can fire up the grill.
Their daughter Maddison loves going outside too, especially since she has two farm cats and six kittens to play with now.
“It’s nice coming back to the farm,” Jennifer said.
